These two harddrives have been around for awhile. At 120GB each, they’re not really big enough to be useful these days. And I had a note about them being bad. I had some drives go south several years ago, these may be the very ones.

Note the eye protection Robert is sporting as he helps to make it really hard to recover any data from these.

After we were through, both cases were broken in addtion to being severely dented.

And the electronics were well shattered.

We didn’t remove the platters, but I’m pretty sure they were dented in our efforts. And I’m sure there is nothing on these drives worth the effort of trying to recover it.

Really, our Christmas present was the trip to Cayman — more photos a bit later.

But there were some nice things under the tree as well.

I have an etched MacNaughton crest for my office courtesy of Robert’s Tech Shop camp last summer.

Sarah got a cool game from Robert (courtesy of the game club at school).

And Robert got a cool Lego set (thank you Santa) and Xbox (which is even now downloading games).

His expression opening the Xbox was well worth the extra packaging and wrapping to make it harder to guess (he actually bought half of it with his saved up allowance — so it might have been only a partial surprise).

And the Lego set called to him strongly after we cleaned up the wrapping paper. (Note the Star Wars PJs that he opened on Christmas eve.)

Rum Point is a sheltered spot on the north east side of the bay. The water was calm at the beach (and there were lots of beach chairs). Getting a little bit out from the shore, and out of the shelter of the point, and the wind driven current picked up.

Robert had noted in the Explore Cayman magazine that the fish liked to congregate under the dock. So we got our snorkels out to go look for ourselves.

There were serveral schools of fish (and they didn’t seem to mind us swimming by at all).

There were even a couple small (we learned yesterday, male, stingrays).

Today we took a short boat trip to Stingray Sandbar. This is not the same spot Sarah and I visited 15 years ago — that was Stingray City, 12 feet deep, a really shallow dive. This was the sandbar, about 2 feet deep.

Too shallow really to snorkel, but we tried; actually it was possible but it was easier to spot the rays standing and looking into the water, then ducking down to see them swimming around.

It was pretty popular, even on a day with a good breeze and more waves and current than normal for this spot.

It lived up to the reputation:

We saw stingrays.

We swam with stingrays (they can swim really fast).

Robert got to hold a stingray.

And Robert got seven years of good luck by kissing a stingray.

It is really cool to be underwater with stingrays (or similarly sized fishes). Robert and I both tried to get pictures of the rays as they swam by us.

His pictures are a bit harder to get so those will come after we get back home (too soon, I’m afraid).

While Robert didn’t get through the pool classes while we were in Alexandria due to congestion limiting his ability to clear his ears, Sarah arranged a Discover Scuba class that got us all into the ocean.

Robert’s online classes and first round of pool work showed off and he was ready for the ocean after just a few minutes in the pool. Sarah and I recalled enough of what we used to know to convince Glen, our guide to let us out in the ocean as well.

Robert, clearly, had a blast!

It was a shore dive, we we walked down the beach in our gear, waded in, popped on our fins and disappeared. At least in theory. We had a little walk to the beach and it’s hard to put on fins with even minimal surf.

And Sarah had to rescue my tank which wanted to stay on the surface.

Once we got underway — which really was not that hard — we saw reefs, cool tropical fish, and even a couple snorkelers who were swimming out from the beach.

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